To REALLY free the economy we need a million of doctors from France, India, UK and Cuba competing here, locally, against our home grown millionaire surgeons. The #1 reason companies are outsourcing and people are leaving is this enormous burden of medical racketeering.
Come on, the world is so much larger than the information technology sector and most problems that can't be solved by coding.
Liberalizing immigration in all other skilled industries is a good idea, too.
ADDED: Note that neither "programmer" nor "software" appear in the original article: the author is talking about all H1-Bs, which includes medical specialists. (Though, licensing issues might prove a more significant employment barrier for foreign doctors than immigration rules, and those also need to be addressed.)
This reminded me of Dr. Devi Prasad Shetty (of Narayan Hrudayalaya, Karnataka, India) who created a very innovative Micro-health scheme (http://www.yeshasvini.org/) of distributing the cost of heart surgery among the masses for a meager 10 cents (5 Rs) a month.
Today, approximately 1.6 million farmers are eligible to receive heart surgeries (and 955 other surgery types)
He has recently started getting traction in New Delhi for a similar scheme.
I know several guys, who were doctors in former USSR, came to US, and now are working in department stores, or driving a taxi, because the path to get licensed in the US is too long, overcomplicated, and costs lots of money.
After the collapse of the USSR, lots of medical doctors and other specialized workers found themselves without a job. Today in Western Europe you can find construction workers who were doctors in the Ukraine SSR or Moldova in the 1980s, These people are a huge source of qualified work, but to the best of my knowledge only one country (Portugal) has shown any interest in re-training them as doctors to meet the severe lack of qualified medical personnel. It's interesting to note that in the former Soviet republics, being a doctor did not have the same status (let alone financial compensation) as in the West.
I know that Canada has been trying to lure medical doctors from abroad (Eastern Europe and elsewhere) in recent years, but they're after the young graduates, not the old veterans who were disowned by the fall of Communism.
Unfortunately, the doctors' lobby in the U.S. is too powerful. In order to keep their salaries inflated, they will never allow the U.S. to import doctors from abroad, even if that would mean that the average American would have access to more affordable healthcare.
That is very sad. I remember growing up in USSR, they had very good doctors. They didn't have carpeted hospitals, TVs in every hospital room, or fancy technology but doctors were good.
I remember when I was 11 I broke my front teeth on a bycicle. We went to the dentist. He sat me in the chair and said "Well, cosmonaut, let's see what we can do", and he rebuilt my teeth in 2 days. All he got in return from my mom and I were flowers and a thank you. There was no insurance, no co-pays, none of that bullshit. And I still have the same teeth he rebuilt now 20 years later. I heard that doctor moved to live in Canada...
Yeah, I can second that, having been born and spent part of my childhood in the USSR.
The medicine was neither on the forefront of high technology nor equally distributed nor ideal, but the preventive tactics and the highly rigourous, fundamentals-oriented education of the doctors more than made up for it.
It's the same idea as Eastern Bloc polytechnic institutes; why do you think 15 of the 16 bank / capital crime hackers wanted by the FBI are ex-Soviet? It's certainly not because they had access to the latest and greatest Western commercial gear at any point in their education or experience. It turns out that it doesn't matter; the focus was on strong mathematics, computational theory and machine processing. They understand what a buffer overflow is and how to effect one easier, better and faster than their more empirically trained counterparts.
We have a family doctor in his 80s now who still practices medicine in what's left of the state system in Russia. After my parents get frustrated with yet another round with pointless paper-shuffling bureaucrats practising defensive medicine, with their army of office assistants, nurses, medical billing consultants and transcriptionists, they
unfailingly call him for good advice - and it works.
Little Portugal can't take on the huge surplus of doctors from Eastern Europe -- many still end up construction workers as well (although the salaries compared to back home end up being worth it).
Definitely a shame we can't get them to the US. It is insane that we have roughly the same number of doctors as we did 30 years ago, despite increases in population and average age.
I don't know much about Portugal, but I know it's a small country. I didn't claim that Portugal can take on the huge surplus of doctors from Eastern Europe, but they seem to be taking steps in the right direction, just like they did on drug decriminalization. Other countries could and should follow Portugal's steps.
Not all of healthcare consists of curing cancer and performing open heart surgery. A lot of medical practice is terribly dull and vanilla. It would be hard to go against the doctors' lobby, but perhaps a compromise could be reached. Doctors want to keep their salaries high. People want affordable healthcare. There are a lot of people who simply can't afford healthcare anyway, so they are not even in the market. Re-training foreign doctors could be a step towards a more-affordable healthcare system.
Worst-case scenario, ask Bill Gates for a couple of billion USD. Hire foreign doctors, retrain them and place in Vancouver. Then allow American citizens to cross the border to have access to healthcare. The colluding doctors of the U.S. could not fight it.
Nurse practitioners have a been a stopgap, providing basic care. Doctor's lobbies have been fighting against those in various states too though, sadly. They're quite powerful.
So much passion for free markets, yet they only exist in theory...
The U.S. is run by interest groups, unfortunately. Other countries are run by interest groups, too, but at least they have the decency not to claim their system is a capitalist one.
> to the best of my knowledge only one country (Portugal) has shown any interest in re-training them as doctors to meet the severe lack of qualified medical personnel.
A lot of doctors in Israel are immigrants from former Soviet Republics.
That does not surprise me, given that many Russians and Ukrainians moved to Israel after the fall of the USSR. But did those doctors start their lives in Israel as construction workers? Or did they start practicing Medicine right away?
To REALLY free the economy we need a million of doctors from France, India, UK and Cuba competing here, locally, against our home grown millionaire surgeons. The #1 reason companies are outsourcing and people are leaving is this enormous burden of medical racketeering.
Come on, the world is so much larger than the information technology sector and most problems that can't be solved by coding.